Count the Idiocies, Again

…Once all the neon lights come on, Annandale – a small city in Fairfax County, Northern Virginia – transforms into a Koreatown, with restaurants and karaoke bars…one such bar has blacked out windows and a facade decorated with fairy lights. Beyond its doors, an unwelcoming middle-aged Korean woman stands behind the dimly lit bar and a large screen shows Korean video-clips. An Asian man on a stool stares at newcomers1…A young Korean woman wearing an off-the-shoulder top sits alone in one of the karaoke booths. Too bored to look up2, she plays on her phone as a huge screen blasts a K-pop classic…The surroundings may appear a little grim, but a good time in a bar like this will set back the average punter far more than in many of the trendiest bars in Washington3. That’s because many of these bars provide…hostesses known as doumis, who[se job is] to entertain clients by singing and drinking with them, and in the seediest establishments, having sex with them4…Karaoke bars like this have opened up a new front in America’s war on human trafficking and the illegal sex market5. Massage parlours in the US – where prostitution is illegal everywhere except Nevada6 – have long been notorious as fronts for the sex trade and for exploiting women mostly from China and Korea7. But as…new government policies are introduced, the enslavement strategies used by traffickers…are getting more sophisticated8…History shows that human traffickers are quick to adapt to, and take advantage of, changing societal norms9. One of the latest trends traffickers have managed to bend to their advantage is an increasing fashion for South Korean women to undergo plastic surgery as a way of enhancing their career prospects10…Limited access to legitimate financial services leaves many women no option but to seek informal loans, making them vulnerable to traffickers11…Once a woman is lured into prostituting herself, traffickers also use plastic surgery as a way of perpetuating the debt bondage12…Few women can break the vicious circle as they go from loan to loan, trying without success to stitch their lives together13…Complex networks – from drivers to pimps and brokers who lend money at extortionately high interest rates in both countries – are built around the victims of sex trafficking14…Not only is plastic surgery used to trap women in these networks, but an array of beauty salons in the US…profit from it…[prohibitionist weirdo] Connie Chung Joe [said]…“First they go to the nail salon, then the hair salon, then they get their make-up done. These girls have to pay for it”15…Polaris…found that out of more than 32,000 cases of human trafficking16 between December 2007 and December 2016…massage parlours accounted for 2,949 cases, putting them second only to escort services as a source of the problem17…[prohibitionists] and [pigs] say that trafficked women tend not to regard themselves as victims18, and that this is particularly the case with Asian women19…Constance Rossiter, YMCA’s programme director for Trafficked Persons Assistance…says the networks that bring Chinese women into the US are complex20…Rossiter says…“it’s a shame-based culture”21…[a Washington bureaucrat named Steven Wagner] says…“the fact they have to work…to pay off a sum of money that had been agreed, they find that acceptable”22…cultural backgrounds combined with stigma…often lead women arrested at massage businesses to insist to police they are prostituting themselves “of their own free will”23…

1) I’ll bet she’s only “unwelcoming” to busybody American women who positively reek of racism. And the dude on the stool was probably staring at Raquel’s camera and wondering how bad the othering in her story is going to be (answer: pretty damned awful).

2) That’s not boredom; she’s just ignoring nosey parkers like Raquel who obviously have no intention of paying her.

3) You get what you pay for: fun K-girls rather than prudish beltway hipsters like Raquel.

4) You know you’re about to see a torrent of prohibitionist vomit as soon as the word “seedy” appears.

5) I did warn you. “Illegal sex” is about the least-bootlicking phrase in this mess, so proceed accordingly.

6) As regular readers know, it ain’t really legal in Nevada either, but discovering that would’ve required actual research rather than simple regurgitation.

9) That would be a good trick, considering the concept was invented less than a generation ago.

10) See, unlike men, women are much too stupid to make conscious decisions about enhancing our incomes. So any time it seems like a woman (especially a nonwhite woman) is making such a rational decision, it’s really “sex traffickers” luring her into it.

11) Yes, non-bank loans now constitute “trafficking”. But student loans that you have to pay for decades & can go to jail for defaulting on aren’t at all exploitative, no sirree!

12) “Lured into prostituting herself”? Surely Raquel didn’t mean to imply that women have so much agency; doesn’t she get we’re all “prostituted” by others? And obviously anyone incapable of deciding to have sex is surely unable to decide to have plastic surgery. Women are incapable of making any decisions about our bodies without evil men coercing us, except for abortion of course.

13) Funny how these imaginary “trafficking victims” sound a lot more like people outside the demimonde, struggling to pay debts with fixed paychecks from which the government extracts huge fractions, than like all the real-life sex workers who find it much easier to pay debts than they did when they had straight jobs.

15) This is quite possibly the most mind-bogglingly stupid and blatantly racist part of this whole heap of filth. I can’t think of any industry other than show business in which the employer pays for beauty treatments. So if a white woman gets her nails done, it means the nail techs are “trafficked”, but if an Asian woman gets her nails done, it means she’s trafficked? What? How does this even make sense to prohibitionists?

16) There haven’t been 32,000 cases of “trafficking” since the term was invented. This is the number of calls to Polaris’ hotline, almost none of which actually correspond to anything in the real world.

17) Could it be any clearer that the term “human trafficking” is being used here as a dysphemism for “sex work”?

18) Gee, I wonder why that might be?

19) Why won’t those damned Asian women accept the slurs their benevolent white saviors label them with? Don’t they know their kind is too stupid to understand their own lives, and they should accept the wise guidance of white cops and religious fanatics who want to “save” them via unemployment and deportation?

8 Responses

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a waiting room, where a telescreen on the wall was blaring out some local news network. A gang of blithering torsos came on, and pontificated about “human trafficking”. Oh boy, I could have filled a half-dozen bullshit bingo cards right there and then, if I only I could have been swift enough.

>>…cultural backgrounds combined with stigma…often lead women arrested at massage businesses to insist to police they are prostituting themselves “of their own free will”<<

Uh…stigma would lead the women to claim the exact OPPOSITE. That's how stigma works. When homosexuality had a strong stigma and their bars/lounges would be raided by the police, *denial* of being gay or lesbian was stated. This writer is appallingly idiotic.

“She (Raquel Carvalho) received a grant from the US State Department to travel to Washington, Houston and Los Angeles”

We there you have it. The rescue industry using our tax money to support one of their own.

There is so much wrong with this article that I can’t even say it[s close enough to be wrong. This is what you get when you base your entire narrative on speaking with those who either profit from the rescue industry, or the law enforcement carceral state cheer leaders that profit from this twisted and deeply racist world view.

If she is unwilling to dirty her hands by listening to an actual K girl, she could at least read Laura Agustin’s seminal “Sex at the Margins.” When Ms. Carvalho travels to Asia it’s on a vacation to “study the primitives,” but when an Asian women travels to a white country and support the trip through sex work it’s immigration ALWAYS involves coercion and exploitation. You know, brown skinned women can really only be understood in terms of forced labor, usually of the sexual kind.

I just can’t believe this “White Women’s Burden” view of Asian women can make it into print. If she described any other racial group using such overtly racist paternalistic tropes she would rightly be called for exactly what she is. But when it comes to Asian women you somehow get a free pass.

Ironically, anyone who has actually met a K girl would find them to usually be multi-lingual, cosmopolitan from traveling and working in multiple countries (The US is almost never their first stop) and incredibly savvy business women the way most sex workers are.

For every K girl that makes it to the US for sex work there are 50 who are stopped by immigration, so there is no need for debt bondage or force under a system where the supply greatly outstrips the demand. Why on earth would anyone bother seeing a women who did not want to be here when there are 50 who are grateful they are here?

As for Doumis, she managed to get almost everything wrong. These women cater almost entirely to Korean Clientele (foreigners will need a personal invitation from a Korean in good standing) and while I’m sure sex does occur, there is no presumption of that. Korean culture has a long tradition of women in driving bars who are there solely to light cigarettes, pour drinks, join in song and generally pad the male ego of the clientele. She may or may not have sex with the men and if she does it’s a mutual agreement, but the majority of the encounters involve no sex at all.

I refuse to insult a lady so will simply call her misinformed. If a man made these same claims I would be less gentle and simply call him a parochial moron.

“Wagner says the perception of debt bondage in the Asian community also stops victims coming forward.”

Here is a recent story about a Chinese massage worker who committed suicide rather than turn herself over the cops in pursuit. Here’s the best part of the story:

“According to Hai, his sister told him she was sexually assaulted by a man flashing a badge who held her at gunpoint and claimed to be an undercover cop. The family was also told the police were trying to recruit Song to be an informant.”

That’s right Ms. Carvalho. It’s not the cops steal all her money, have her evicted, take all her electronics, force her to incur an early termination lease penalty, put her at-risk as a mother, and in the case above likely raped her and made her an informant that she finds frightening.

OT: Mere weeks after the 97-2 Senate vote passing SESTA, the US gubmint has seized and shut down backpage.com, including all worldwide versions. Since Friday, the site is either broken, or shows an ominous badge-ridden announcement.

Google must be involved with the Backpage.com seizure because Backpage’s cache page is not accessible. When a Web site goes dark, Google’s cache is generally accessible for about a week but not this time.

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